History of Indian Printing Industry

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History of Indian Printing Industry


The printing press first came to Goa with Portuguese missionaries in the mid-sixteenth century. Jesuit priests learned Konkani and printed several tracts. By 1674, about 50 books had been printed in the Konkani and in Kanara languages. Catholic priests printed the first Tamil book in 1579 at Cochin, and in 1713 the first Malayalam book was printed by them. By 1710, Dutch Protestant missionaries had printed 32 Tamil texts, many of them translations of older works. The English language press did not grow in India till quite late even though the English East India Company began to import presses from the late seventeenth century. From 1780, James Augustus Hickey began to edit the Bengal Gazette, a weekly magazine that described itself as ‘a commercial paper open to all, but influenced by none’. So it was a private English enterprise, proud of its independence from the colonial influence that began English printing in India. 
Hickey published a lot of advertisements, including those related to the import and sale of slaves. But he also published a lot of gossip about the Company’s senior officials in India. Enraged by this, Governor-General Warren Hastings persecuted Hickey and encouraged the publication of officially sanctioned newspapers that could counter the flow of information that damaged the image of the colonial government. By the close of the eighteenth century, a number of newspapers and journals appeared in print. There were Indians, too, who began to publish Indian newspapers. The first to appear was the weekly Bengal Gazette, brought out by Gangadhar Bhattacharya, who was close to Rammohun Roy.

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